RFJ Responds to Offensive Translink Ads

From Relatives for Justice:
Translink are currently carrying large recruitment adverts on the exterior of their buses for the British army’s RAF. Relatives for Justice, which represents the injured and families bereaved by the British army have released the following statement.

Speaking on the Translink adverts on bus routes throughout republican and nationalist Belfast Relatives for Justice Director Mark Thompson said,”Obviously this is a commercial decision for Translink rather than support for British armed forces. Nonetheless Translink have displayed a disregard for the legacy of British armed occupation on our streets that resulted in brutality, torture and murder carried out almost exclusively against the nationalist and republican population with impunity.

“In this context the adverts are at best insensitive especially to those injured and bereaved by the British army many of whom have contacted our offices requesting that we publicly raise the matter with Translink. The vast majority of people within West Belfast, and other republican and nationalist areas in the North, find the adverts unwelcome whilst others rightly see them as offensive and provocative.

“Additionally the ads seek to portray the abnormal condition of warfare as somehow normal which is equally offensive given our experience in West Belfast. War crimes like the Ballymurphy Massacre during Internment 1971 are being repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan today by these very same military forces. This is totally unacceptable to our community.

“We would appeal to Translink to reconsider their use of buses carrying these averts throughout nationalist and republican areas in which the British army wreaked havoc and murdered people including children.

Editors’ Notes: For information the British army officially killed 367 people during the course of the conflict that included over 70 children. Approximately 200 were civilians, of those combatants killed many were unarmed, others were killed in pre-meditated and pre-planned military operations in which safe and effective arrests were possible yet political and military decisions were taken to execute people. This contravened international law and the Geneva Convention. The British army’s intelligence agencies controlled and directed colluded with illegal loyalist paramilitary groups claiming hundreds of lives across the community.